I got through my sole engagement--a very dreary one, for surely never were there stupider young people in the whole region of rank than those to whom duty and necessity sent me on the Wednesday mornings of that London season--even with some enjoyment.For the lessons Falconer had been giving me clung to me and grew on me until I said thus to myself: 'Am I to believe only for the poor, and not for the rich? Am I not to bear with conceit even, hard as it is to teach? for is not this conceit itself the measure as the consequence of incapacity and ignorance? They cannot help being born stupid, any more than some of those children in St.Giles's can help being born preternaturally, unhealthily clever.I am going with my friend this evening: that hope is enough to make me strong for one day at least.' So I set myself to my task, and that morning wiled the first gleam of intelligent delight out of the eyes of one poor little washed-out ladyship.I could have kissed her from positive thankfulness.
The day did wear over.The evening did come.I was with my friend--for friend I could call him none the less and all the more that I worshipped him.
'I have business in Westminster,' he said, 'and then on the other side of the water.'
'I am more and more astonished at your knowledge of London, Mr.
Falconer,' I said.'You must have a great faculty for places.'
'I think rather the contrary,' he answered.'But there is no end to the growth of a faculty, if one only uses it--especially when his whole nature is interested in its efficiency, and makes demands upon it.The will applies to the intellect; the intellect communicates its necessities to the brain; the brain bestirs itself, and grows more active; the eyes lend their aid; the memory tries not to be behind; and at length you have a man gifted in localities.'
'How is it that people generally can live in such quiet ignorance of the regions that surround them, and the kind of humanity so near them?' I said after a pause.
'It does seem strange.It is as if a man should not know who were in his own house.Would-be civilization has for the very centre of its citadel, for the citizens of its innermost city, for the heart around which the gay and fashionable, the learned, the artistic, the virtuous, the religious are gathered, a people some of whom are barbarous, some cruel, many miserable, many unhappy, save for brief moments not of hope, but of defiance, distilled in the alembic of the brain from gin: what better life could steam up from such a Phlegethon! Look there: "Cream of the Valley!" As if the mocking serpent must with sweet words of Paradise deepen the horrors of the hellish compound, to which so many of our brothers and sisters made in the image of God, fly as to their only Saviour from the misery of feeling alive.'
'How is it that the civilized people of London do not make a simultaneous inroad upon the haunts of the demons and drive them out?'
'It is a mercy they do not.They would only do infinite mischief.
The best notion civilization seems to have is--not to drive out the demons, but to drive out the possessed; to take from them the poor refuges they have, and crowd them into deeper and more fetid hells--to make room for what?--more and more temples in which Mammon may be worshipped.The good people on the other hand invade them with foolish tracts, that lie against God; or give their money to build churches, where there is as yet no people that will go to them.Why, the other day, a young clergyman bored me, and would have been boring me till now, I think, if I would have let him, to part with a block of my houses, where I know every man, woman, and child, and keep them in comparative comfort and cleanliness and decency, to say no more, that he might pull them down and build a church upon the site--not quite five minutes' walk from the church where he now officiates.'